I have written before about using a 🚀 Keyboard-only Setup to navigate around more quickly while working. That post focused on writing blogs in Markdown, but that is just the start. There are many other aspects to look at, such as window management. That is exactly what this article will be focusing on. This is an exploration of the different possibilities. I fully understand that learning a long list of shortcuts takes time and at first, will even lead to reduced productivity.
Mac Spaces
When doing focused work, it’s important to have as few distractions as possible. Something that can help with that is Mac Spaces. The Spaces feature allows you to create multiple virtual desktops, each with its own set of windows and applications. This can be useful for organising work and keeping different tasks separate. For example, by having one Space for writing and another for software development.
The most relevant keyboard shortcuts are:
| Shortcut | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ⌃ + up | Open Mission Control |
| ⌃ + left/right | Navigate left/right between Spaces |
Although the mouse-pad gestures (swiping up/left/right with 3 fingers) are also really good for navigation.
Another small change that could improve productivity is to hide the dock on MacOS. This way, there’s more screen real estate and fewer distractions.
Window assignment
It is possible to assign windows to specific Spaces. For example, 🪨 Obsidian can be assigned to a designated writing Space.
As far as I’m aware, it’s not possible to assign specific instances of an app to a specific Space. I have tried looking into Shortcuts and Focus modes, but none could provide a good enough solution.
Open links in Safari Tab Group
When using Safari Tab Groups, links are automatically in a default window instead of in the currently active tab group. This makes it more difficult to manage tabs depending on the context you are working in. One way to solve this is to use Focus Modes and configure Focus Filters for Safari.
Tiling Window Manager
More information about Tiling Window Managers can be found in 💎 Amethyst Window Manager.
Vim-like browser shortcuts
A final tool for this post is Vimari, a tool that introduces Vim-like keyboard shortcuts in Safari. The tool itself is a lightweight port of Vimium, which is a Chrome or Firefox extension. Both extensions are designed to allow users to perform common web browsing tasks, such as navigating to and interacting with websites, without the need to use a mouse or trackpad.
The coolest feature is that it generates keyboard shortcuts for links on the fly by clicking f. This way, you never have to move your mouse, no matter where the link is on the page.
The most relevant keyboard shortcuts are:
| Shortcut | Meaning |
|---|---|
| f | Toggle links |
| j/k | Scroll up/down |
| H | Go back in history |
| x | Close current tab |
Even though the default MacOS shortcut ⌘ + W is pretty efficient, typing x is even faster.
Conclusion
This is again just a very quick look at different tools that exist. You could go much further and learn many more shortcuts, but this is an overview of the most important ones to get started with these tools. The idea is to experiment with this for a while before moving further to even more keyboard-only shortcuts.